David McCumber: whistling past the nuclear graveyard

David McCumber

Published 8:07 pm, Monday, February 24, 2014

WASHINGTON -- One nice thing about announcing an "all-of-the-above" energy policy, as the Obama administration has done, is that it requires all of the careful consideration and discernment that a Labrador retriever shows toward food.

If you never met an energy source you didn't love, you can make momentous, multibillion-dollar decisions without concern for inconvenient facts. So Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz showed us last week, when he blithely put the federal government on the hook for $6.5 billion in loan guarantees for a project to build the first two new commercial nuclear plant reactors in 30 years.

Underwriting construction of nuclear power plants means assuming a worrisome amount of risk for the taxpayers' money -- more than Wall Street was comfortable with, in this case -- but that's not new. The federal government has historically subsidized and underwritten nuclear projects. And of course nuclear's current rationale of being a carbon-free power source works in its favor. Although it's also ruefully clear that we know a lot more now than we did three decades ago about risk.

Nothing nuclear in the news this week is designed to ease those concerns. The manager of nuclear safety at the troubled, massively contaminated nuclear-waste site at Hanford, Wash., was fired after blowing the whistle on safety problems. A radiation leak has shut the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a New Mexico storage site for lower-level waste, for several days last week.

And the ongoing, slow-motion horror that is Fukushima produced another ugly headline -- the leakage of more than 100 tons of highly contaminated water from one of the site's more than 1,000 storage tanks.

It's bad enough that the surge in renewables and the glut of cheap natural gas make nuclear construction look staggeringly expensive, particularly in an environment where several operators have recently opted to take nuke plants offline rather than repair them or even invest more in their continued operation. But the really reprehensible part of the federal loan guarantee is that it comes from the same administration that has halted any progress toward finding a permanent solution for the storage of spent nuclear fuel, for reasons just as cynically political as the approval itself.

The government's decision to underwrite the Vogtle nuke project in Georgia represents doubling down on a terrifying bet that somehow -- no one can say precisely how -- we will avoid a disaster of epic proportions involving the thousands of tons of highly radioactive fuel rods filling overcrowded pools at nuclear sites across the country.

When history gets around to considering President Obama's legacy on energy and the environment, the Keystone XL pipeline decision -- yea or nay -- will pale in comparison to the partisan hack move of shelving the designation of Yucca Mountain, Nev., as a deep geological storage site for spent fuel rods and other high-level waste.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of "flouting the law" by not completing its assessment of Yucca Mountain. Further, "The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections," the court ruled.

Supposedly, the NRC is again working on its assessment of Yucca Mountain.

But it doesn't take a scientific review to understand that before we build new nuclear plants, we should have a place to put the waste they produce, which will be dangerous for the next 160,000 years.